The Hardest Case - The Oxford Topic of Food, Politics, and Society - page 136

centers but to and from port facilities for international transport. Colonial capitals
were often situated in port cities, looking outward rather than inward, and some of
the most powerful institutions in these capitals were the monopoly export marketing
boards that commandeered agricultural products from local growers at a low price,
so as to maximize profit when the product was sold on the international market at
a high price. Labor to operate the cash-cropping system was often locally comman-
deered as well, separating young men from their families and from traditional farm-
ing activities.
This institutional legacy did not disappear when the colonial period ended in the
1960s. The monopoly marketing boards continued to siphon wealth out of the farm-
ing sector, but now for the benefit of the newly independent African regimes, typically
governed by a narrow European-trained urban professional class. The African political
class that gained independence typically wanted nothing to do with farming. Eager to
industrialize so as to catch up with the developed world, these new urban leaders of
independent Africa continued to use the instruments of rural extraction they had inher-
ited from the Europeans. In 1992, Maurice Schiff and Alberto Valdes, from the World
Bank, calculated that between 1960 and 1985 the newly independent governments of
Africa used direct and indirect policy measures to impose the equivalent of a 30 percent
tax on their agricultural sectors, an extraction of resources from farming that was not
matched or compensated by any offsetting public investments in the countryside (Schiff
and Valdes 1992).
A second dimension of the colonial legacy is one that continues to the present day.
Because the economies of Africa's young states did not prosper after independence, the
governments of those states became dependent on international financial assistance,
both from individual donor countries (often the former colonizer) and from interna-
tional financial institutions (such as the World Bank and the International Monetary
Fund [IMF]). On a per-capita basis, Africa receives three times as much foreign aid
as any of the other developing regions. As a percentage of gross domestic product
(GDP), Africa is even more dependent on aid (Devarajan, Rajkumar, and Swaroop
1999). Measures for 1970-1993 constructed by Burnside and Dollar (2000) show that
a sampling of twenty-one nations in sub-Saharan Africa were, on average, more than
four times as dependent on aid, relative to GDP, as a sampling of thirty-five develop-
ing countries outside of sub-Saharan Africa. The average sub-Saharan African country
now derives roughly 13 percent of its entire GDP from foreign aid, which is five times
the foreign-aid dependence experienced by the recovering nations of Western Europe
after World War II at the height of the Marshall Plan. African governments today need
a continuing stream of foreign assistance simply to service their accumulated external
debts. Of the forty “heavily indebted poor countries” recently permitted to seek debt
relief under a World Bank/IMF initiative, thirty-three were African countries. In these
heavily indebted aid-dependent countries, new spending for development is seldom
undertaken without some prior assurance of new donor support. Donor support for
state investments in rural public goods went into an unfortunate decline beginning in
the 1980s.